二十一世纪的探索家们去了地球上最热、最冷、最高的地方。从喜马拉雅山到南极，到比它们更高更极端的地方，这本书呈现了极端生理学的历史。极端生理学是人体在最极端、极限的状况下的研究。不像许多关于现代生理医学的书，本书主要关注的是野外工作、探索、远征，而不是实验室或者医院里的研究。这些科学家、生理学家以及探索家为了现代科学冒着生命危险去到世界的边缘来研究现人体是如何挑战自己的极限。
 
关于作者：
Vanessa Hegie是Univeristy of Birmingham的Applied Health Research Institute的医学与科学历史的讲师。她是A History of British Sports Medicine的作者，也是《卫报》部落格的The H-Word在2012年－2017年的合著作者。
 
好评：
Michael Robinson, University of Hartford
"I love this book. With its focus on biomedical research in extreme environments, Higher and Colder shows how twentieth-century expeditions—to the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the Himalayas—are stranger than we thought. This story of exploration plays out on ice caps and mountaintops, but also in places not often sketched on the expeditionary map: inside barometric chambers, scientific outposts, and medical laboratories. Heggie examines the tangible and visceral aspects of expeditionary work—blood, food, clothing, equipment—in order to challenge our basic assumptions about the history of expeditionary science: that we know what it is and how it gets done."
Sarah W. Tracy, Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma
"A gripping and revelatory story of the physiologists who went to extremes in the twentieth century as they charted the parameters of human performance in some of the globe’s most inhospitable places. Heggie reveals how these researchers trekked to the tops of mountains and the earth’s icy poles, curious less about these extraordinary environments than the inner workings of human physiology. The world was their laboratory. Higher and Colder likewise explores the complex colonial, military, cultural, and political terrain that framed this style of expeditionary biomedical science. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of the field sciences, environmental history, and the history of twentieth-century medicine."
Peter Hansen, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
“Vanessa Heggie brings to vivid life the history of the sciences of human survival at its limits. Higher and Colder offers a bold and persuasive interpretation of exploration as a scientific practice in the twentieth century, when Mount Everest and the polar regions became natural laboratories for physiological experiments, racial ideologies, gender hierarchies, indigenous technologies, and everyday practices of exploration. Elegantly written, it provides a welcome historical perspective on the biomedical research that has saved the lives of thousands of hikers and mountaineers.”
John West, University of California, San Diego
“This book is a valuable resource. The topics have been thoroughly researched, and the documentation in notes at the end of the book is meticulous. Impressively, even with the depth of its detail, the book is a pleasure to read. Strongly recommended.”